Short and somewhat frothy article about the joy of reading “tough books” (it did make me feel guilty about Slotkin’s trilogy that has been sitting on my shelf for at least a decade).
via The Washington Post:
Getting a mental kick from tackling tough books
by Blake Gopnik
This kind of reading you can’t take on lightly, in moments between weeding the garden and answering your e-mail, or after a long day of meetings. You need some serious time — or some serious sickness and drugs — to clear the decks for such texts. They presented complex arguments to follow and difficult thoughts to parse. Some paragraphs and pages, even the occasional whole essay or chapter, needed several readings to sink in.
Akopos 